| Permanent Revolution | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2006 |
| Headquarters | London |
| Newspaper | Permanent Revolution |
| Ideology | Communism |
| Political position | Far-left |
| International affiliation | Permanent Revolution Tendency |
| European affiliation | None |
| European Parliament Group | None |
| Website | |
| http://www.permanentrevolution.net | |
| Politics of the United Kingdom Political parties Elections |
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Permanent Revolution is a Trotskyist group formed by people expelled from the League for the Fifth International (L5I) in 2006. It takes its name from Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
Contents |
The group was founded after a two year struggle against the perspectives adopted by the L5I at its 2003 Congress. [1] It had first organised as a tendency then as a faction.[2]
The split followed a discussion of how to assess the impact, on class politics in general and the level of class struggle, of two changes:
The group gathered together a minority which argued that, almost without exception, the international left had undertaken no serious rexamination of world perspectives and economy since a "stagnation phase" in the 1970s and 1980s. [3] It felt that as a result, the international left had been unable to explain either the marginalisation of the left or the failure of important protest movements against capitalism (such as the anti-capitalist movement, anti-war movement and Social Forum movements) to sink significant roots into the world working-class.[4][5]
Permanent Revolution argued the L5I perspectives adopted at their Sixth Congress in 2003, that the engine of the world economy had “halted”, that world capitalism was in a “period of stagnation” and as a result the world faced a “pre-revolutionary period,” were fundamentally inaccurate and the refusal of the L5I to correct these perspectives in the light of experience proved they had decisively broken from the method of revolutionary Trotskyism. In contrast Permanent Revolution argued that the integration of the former workers states into world capitalism, when combined with the defeats of the working class in the 1970s/80s, had allowed capitalism to revive itself through globalisation.[6]
Furthermore, it argued that while the working class movement was no longer in the counter revolutionary phase of the 1990s, the movement had still not fully recovered from those defeats and rather was in a transitional period, with uneven struggles, not yet usually generalised or sustained.[7]
Permanent Revolution claims to stand in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky and for the revolutionary programme developed by the early Comintern and the early Fourth International. However, it differs from other Trotskyist organisations in three ways:
At its inauguration in London in July 2006, Permanent Revolution claimed to have had 33 members.[11][12] Its founding meeting involved participants from Britain, Ireland, Chile, Czech Republic, Sweden, Australia, Austria and observers from Argentina. A meeting in September 2006 agreed a Founding Statement [13] which restates its intention to relaunch an international tendency committed to building a new Leninist Trotskyist International. Twenty four British Members were expelled from the League, as well as four Australian members, several Irish members and one member from Sweden.
For the alternative point of view including an edited selection of the L5I's account see below.